Proven Guilty Quotes

I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching--they are your family.

They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.

In an extroverted society, the difference between an introvert and an extrovert is that an introvert is often unconsciously deemed guilty until proven innocent.

You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.

Laughter is good for you. Nine out of ten stand-up comedians recommend laughter in the face of intense stupidity.

A bolt of warmth, fierce with joy and pride and gratitude, flashed through me like sudden lightning. I don’t care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching—they are your family. And they were my heroes.

If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

Vanity, thy name is vampire.

Molly was arrested. Possession.” I blinked at him. “She was possessed?

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I will fear no concussion.

Rule number one of the wizarding business. Never let them see you sweat. People expect us to know things. It can be a big advantage. Don’t screw it up by looking like you’re as confused as everyone else. Bad for the image.

Life can be confusing. Good God, and how. Sometimes it seems like the older I get, the more confused I become. That seems ass-backwards. I thought I was supposed to be getting wiser. Instead, I just keep getting hit over the head with my relative insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe. Confusing, life. But it beats the hell out of the alternative.

You predicted quick victory. Now it’s going to get hopelessly complicated. Jesus, don’t you know any better than that by now?

No rest for the wicked, Bob, and that means that we can't slack off either, or they'll outwork us.

Children are a precious gift, but they belong to no one but themselves. They are only lent us a little while.

All power is the same. Magic. Physical strength. Economic strength. Political strength. It all serves a single purpose-it gives its possessor a broader spectrum of choices. It creates alternative courses of action.

Erlking,” I told her. “Big-time bad guy. Wants to eat me.” “Why?” she asked. “Well. I met him,” I said.

I got the sneaking suspicion that the vampire was a couple of Peeps short of an Easter basket.

I lunged, low and quick, and drove about a foot of cold steel into his danglies. Hey, I don't care what kind of fearie or mortal or hideous creature you are. If you've got danglies, and can loose them, that's the kind of sight that makes you reconsider the possible genitalia-related ramifications of your actions real damned quick.

...you look like you fell out of a crazy tree and hit every branch on the way down.

Beside me, Molly rolled her shoulders in a few jerky motions and pushed at her hair in fitful little gestures. She tugged at her well-tattered skirts, and grimaced at her boots. "Can you see if there’s any mud on them?" I paused to consider her for a second. Then I said, "You have two tattoos showing right now, and you probably used a fake ID to get them. Your piercings would set off any metal detector worth the name, and you’re featuring them in parts of your anatomy your parents wish you didn’t yet realize you had. You’re dressed like Frankenhooker, and your hair has been dyed colors I previously thought existed only in cotton candy.” I turned to face the door again. “I wouldn’t waste time worrying about a little mud on the boots.

You killed my dog! Get your affairs in order.

You don't have to make fun of it." "Actually I do," I said. "I make fun of almost everything.

All saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent.

Insecurity, thy name is teenager.

How long have you been a Sidhe-sicle?

...the Stone Table [was] a place that served as the OK Corral for the Faerie Courts when they decided to engage in diplomacy by means of murdering anyone on the other team.

Children have their own kind of power. When you're teaching them, protecting them, you are more than you thought you could be. More understanding, more patient, more capable, more wise.

I checked the icebox. The faeries usually brought some sort of food to stock the icebox and the pantry when they cleaned, but they could have mighty odd ideas about what constituted a healthy diet. One time I'd opened the pantry and found nothing but boxes and boxes and boxes of Fruit Loops. I had a near-miss with diabetes, and Thomas, who was never quite sure where the food had come from, declared that I had clearly been driven Fruit Loopy.

You need a prostate to understand,” I said.

She bowed her head and said, "Lord of hosts, please stand with us against this darkness." The quiet, bedrock-deep energy of true faith brushed against me. Murphy echoed the gesture and the amen. Thomas and I tried to look theologically invisible.

I’m a pessimist of the human condition, as a rule, but contemplating the future and how the Carpenter kids could contribute to it was the kind of thought that gave me hope for us all, despite myself. Of course, I suppose someone must once have looked down upon young Lucifer and considered what tremendous potential he contained.

When people say the word "convention," they are usually referring to large gatherings of the employees of companies and corporations who attend a mass assembly, usually in a big hotel somewhere, for the purpose of pretending to learn stuff when they are in fact enjoying a free trip somewhere, time off work, and the opportunity to flirt with strangers, drink, and otherwise indulge themselves. The first major difference between a business convention and a fan-dom convention is that fandom doesn’t bother with the pretenses. They’re just there to have a good time. The second difference is the dress code— the ensembles at a fan convention tend to be considerably more novel.

The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight. No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, fleeing at velocities that approach the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the Terror of the Universe.

I kicked the door open, staff held ready to fight, and shouted, "And I'm all outta bubble gum!

Guilty until proven innocent - A

Sometimes I get tired of being the guy who is supposed to deal with un-deal-withable situations.

Murphy, you rock! Go team Dresden!" "Hey, I'm the one who rocks... Go team Murphy.

If she is innocent! Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or Abigail? Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem—vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

I leaned closer and gave her the look I usually save for rampaging demons and those survey people at malls.

Investigate the faeries. Great. That was absolutely guaranteed to get complicated before I got any useful answers. If there was one thing faeries hated doing, it was giving you a straight answer, about anything. Getting plain speech out out of one is like pulling out teeth. Your own teeth. Through your nose.

When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching—they are your family.

I am against justice … whenever it is carried out by a mob.

Taken out of context and given a forty-degree twist, you can use the Bible to justify almost anything.

Mouse isn't big. He's compactly challenged.

You're mad," the fallen angel said. "Get me some Alka Seltzer and I'll foam at the mouth, too.

Food commonly eaten for more than 150 years should be innocent until proven guilty, and food invented in the last 150 years is guilty until proven innocent.

She is my child,” Charity objected. “She was,” Forthill corrected her, “if only for a time. Children are a precious gift, but they belong to no one but themselves. They are only lent us a little while.

Hey. I don't care what kind of faerie or mortal or hideous creature you are. If you've got danglies and can lose them, that's the kind of sight that make you reconsider the possible genitalia-related ramifications of your actions real damned quick.

Sometimes I thought it might be nice not to make any choices. If I never had one, I could never screw it up.

It's only paranoia if I'm wrong. - Harry Dresden

Everyone thinks magic is something different.

Harry Dresden. I'm on a mission from God.

You can’t change what has already happened. But you choose what to do next. Which means that you only cross over to the dark side if you choose to do it.

I had about as much chance to do that as I did of backpacking my car to the top of Mount Rushmore.

I thought it was 'innocent until proven guilty'' "That's just one of the bigger lies we live by.

AIDS would have claimed fewer lives if we had publicly recommended what I wish to call ‘The Presumption of Sickness,’ i.e., the principle that whomever we are about to sleep with is HIV-positive until proven HIV-negative.

Maybe this is what it feels like for civilians when they see cops doing some of the dirty work. A lot of times they don’t understand what’s happening. They see something they don’t like and it upsets them—because they don’t have the full story, aren’t personally facing the problem, and don’t know how much worse the alternative could be.

When in court, the primary role of lawyers is not to prove or disprove innocence; unbeknown to almost all lawyers and their clients, it is to save the court time.

your ability to comprehend your environment is very strongly defined by your belief in a number of illusions. Time. Truth. Love.

Truth be told, my head was spinning so much that the car could have been doing interpretive dance in a lilac tutu and I might not have noticed.

Professional Wizard Incinerates Amateur Vampire. News at ten.

Faith in what?” “That things will unfold as they are meant to,” Forthill said. “That even in the face of an immediate ugliness, the greater picture will resolve into something all the more beautiful.

The warehouse was a part of the wharves down at the lakeside, and even the chill waters of Lake Michigan were warmer than usual. They filled the air with more than the average water-scent of mud and mildew and eau de dead fishy.

Harry,” she said. “What if we can’t find out who is doing it in time?” “We’ll find them,” I said. “But if we don’t?” “Then we fight monsters.” Murphy took a deep breath and nodded as we stepped out into the summer night. “Damn right we do.

Ladies,” I say tightly. “Just for the record, the way our legal system works, you’re innocent until you’re proven guilty. And that doesn’t happen until the trial, which doesn’t happen until months after you’re arrested. Maybe you’d know that if you spent more time in civics class and less time making yourselves look like baby prostitutes.

The best way to keep yourself from doing something grossly self-destructive and stupid is to avoid the temptation to do it. For example, it is far easier to fend off inappropriate amorous desires if one runs screaming from the room every time a pretty girl comes in.

Suicide is something that hangs around forever, dropping load after load of guilt on the living.

Like an old snakebit hound wanting his own cave under a house, I wanted to go home to lick my wounds.

I longed for my bed. I longed for sleep.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I will fear no concussion. Crane

Harry Dresden Taxidermy. If you snuff it, we'll stuff it.

He's a lawyer, he's a priest. This does not compute. - Harry Dresden

Children have their own kind of power. When you’re teaching them, protecting them, you are more than you thought you could be.

I didn’t follow her right away. She didn’t look back. Stab. Twist. God, I love being a wizard.

I respected the man. It didn’t mean that I wouldn’t pants him on national television if I got the opportunity,

to whom much is given, much is required.

She was,” Forthill corrected her, “if only for a time. Children are a precious gift, but they belong to no one but themselves. They are only lent us a little while.

Children are a precious gift, but they belong to no one but themselves.

Accusations are convictions in the public mind. You are guilty until proven innocent.

The presumption of innocent until proven guilty has been overshadowed by the presumption of guilty until proven wealthy

One can go on saying for years that one doesn't listen to gossip, that the absent cannot defend themselves from slander, etc., etc.; but, after all, isn't the provocation of so much gossip an offense in itself?

Life can be confusing. Good God, and how. Sometimes it seems like the older I get, the more confused I become. That seems ass-backwards. I thought I was supposed to be getting wiser. Instead, I just keep getting hit over the head with my relative insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe. Confusing, life.

Back then, my brown eyes radiated the purity of my soul, which now tell stories of wounds inflicted on it. I saw people in the same light as the law does—“innocent until proven guilty”—as opposed to how I look at the world now—“guilty until proven innocent.

...There is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.' 'What's that supposed to mean?' I asked. 'That the good that will come is not always obvious. Nor easy to see. Nor in the place we would expect to find it. Nor what we personally desire. You should consider that the good being created by the events this night may have nothing to do with the defeat of supernatural evils or endangered lives. It may be something very quiet. Very ordinary.

Giving anyone the benefit of the doubt is expected. Innocent until proven guilty; that’s the law. But denial of reality is simply, well, pitiful. Indeed, when someone in whom you believed—someone you supported—turns around and betrays you, righteous indignation is the most appropriate reaction.

I witnessed the birth of time itself. I watched the mortal coil spring forth from perfect darkness. I watched the stars form, watched this world coalesce, watched as life was breathed into it and as your kind rose to rule it." She put both hands on the table and leaned toward me, her blue eyes cold and hard. "Thus far, I have behaved as a guest ought. But do not mistake propriety for weakness, mortal. I beg you not to oblige me to take further action.

now, I still didn’t have enough money to pay for all the repairs, and I had set out to fix the door on my own. I hadn’t framed it very well, but I try to think positive: The new door was arguably even more secure than the old one—now you could barely get the damned thing open even when it wasn’t locked.

Thomas didn't want to go into the church because he wasn't optimistic that the Almighty and his institutions would smile on him. Like me, he favored maintaining a low profile with regards to matters temporal. [...] I knew how he felt. I hadn't been in a church since I'd smacked my hand down on Lasciel's ancient silver coin. Hell, I had a freaking fallen angel in my head-or at least a facsimile of one. If that wasn't a squirt of lemon juice in God's eye, I didn't know what was. But I had a job to do.

The West has to take a critical look at itself and examine the apparent double standards at work that allow it to attack Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction but not North Korea, whose leader shared Saddam Hussein's megalomaniacal qualities; that permit it to rail against Iran about nuclear weapons but be silent about Israel's arsenal; that allow it to only selectively demand enforcement of UN resolutions. The West has to own up to the mistakes it has made: such as with Abu Ghraib and the torture in Afghan prisons; in the errant attacks on civilians; in its disregard for the basic precept of a civilized legal system, which maintains that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty.

I've had too much money to be able to tell who my friends are...

Sometimes I get tired of being the guy who is supposed to deal with un-deal-withable situations. I

Most of the time, perhaps 99 percent of the time, the defendant is guilty; his screams are the final protest of a human being about to lost his most precious possession, his freedom.

Yet the people who cry, “What about the presumption of innocence?” often behave as though there is no objective answer to “Did he do it?” until the trial is over. As though they think people accused of crimes are literally “innocent until proven guilty.” I’m not sure how that would work, exactly—once the verdict comes in, would the accused and the victim travel back in time, so the rape in question could either happen or not happen, based on what the jury decided? If you can’t grasp that any person accused of a crime has already either done it or not done it, regardless of what a future jury has to say, you have a very interesting understanding not only of time and space but of the law. How are police supposed to investigate suspects and make arrests if no one is allowed to draw a reasonable inference that someone is guilty until a jury has officially said so? How are prosecutors supposed to meet their burden of proof, so a jury can officially say so? In reality, lots of people within the justice system—let alone outside it—start to presume guilt after a certain point, because that’s their job

These social media shamings bear an uncanny resemblance to medieval witch hunts.” If you were accused of being a witch back then, you were shit out of luck. Being accused was all it took. Forget “innocent until proven guilty.” Nobody bothered to prove your guilt. Nobody dared to speak up on your behalf, for fear of being called a witch sympathizer. Because if you were seen as the friend of a witch, you were the next one to be accused of being a witch. As soon as a woman was accused of being a witch, she was a pariah without any friends. Nobody wanted to be seen in public with her. The whole village ganged up on her. Everyone was trying to outdo everyone else in their antiwitch fervor: “Look at me! I'm throwing rocks at the witch! Look at how much I hate witches! I am definitely NOT a witch myself!” Whenever I see a social media mob ganging up on a celebrity for supposedly saying something “offensive” it reminds me of the Salem witch hysteria: “That's racist! And me calling you a racist proves that I'm definitely not a racist myself! That's sexist! I shame you! And that means I'm definitely not sexist myself! I shame you for being a bad person. That means I'm a good person! Look at how really really offended I am! That means I'm a really really good person!” According to the bible, Jesus said "let he who is without sin throw the first rock." But a lot of people seem to think he said: "If you throw rocks at someone else, it proves that you're without sin.

My kids, you, and I can have good things happen as a result of our Total Money Makeover only if we have the spiritual character to recognize that wealth is not the answer to life’s questions. We further must recognize that while wealth is very fun, it comes with great responsibility. Another paradox is that wealth will make you more of what you are. Let that one soak in for a minute. If you are a jerk and you become wealthy, you will be king of the jerks. If you are generous and you become wealthy, you will be most generous. If you are kind, wealth will allow you to show kindness in immeasurable ways. If you feel guilty, wealth will ensure that you feel guilty for the rest of your life.

Conspiracy is a vague legal category that does not require the accused to have participated in illegal activity to be guilty of allegedly dangerous associations. Its capaciousness has proven a convenient way to target different anarchist networks and radical groups who have planned protests, participated in direct actions, or organized international solidarity efforts.

The overarching principle of a therapeutic relationship is that therapists should be ever mindful of a variant of the Hippocratic oath and, to the degree possible, strive to "do no more harm" (Courtois, 2010). Complex trauma clients have already experienced considerable harm, much of it at the hands of other human beings. As a result of the ubiquitous processes of transference, attachment styles, and IWM [Internal working models], these clients often view the therapist's behavior and their relationship through the lens of their trauma-related negative interpersonal expectancies and unhealed emotional wounds and injuries. Therapists should not be surprised to be "guilty until proven innocent", not because clients with complex trauma histories are "unfair" or "unreasonable" but precisely the opposite - because the most realistic self-protective stance for them (given the fact that betrayal and harm have been more the rule than the exception) is to "distrust first and verify" (or to be hypervigilant) rather than to start with an expectation of safety and trustworthiness.

...The same folks who believe this fantasy also believe that the sole motivation for modern man's practice of science is to disprove their beliefs. How despicably arrogant of them to circumvent their burden of proof! It is plainly there for all to see that science wishes to discover and prove the answers to the very same questions that religion claims to already have answers for, whether or not they disprove former assumptions by our ancestors. The religionists should be happy that that their claims might have the chance to be proven wrong, but instead they would rather fear them disproven. I don't know about you, but I smell a guilty conscience. If they were one-hundred percent certain that their claims were of truth, they wouldn't need "faith" in them, nor would they have to dread possible invalidation.

My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without. Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable. […] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.